Invincible Iron Man 500

In which the series undergoes the inevitable switch-over from the innocuous number of 33 to 500, as is the Mighty Marvel Trend with all the marquee names or marquee names-in-waiting, incorporating all the previous Iron Man titles along with mini-series, one-shots, and, what the hell, probably Contest Of The Champions, for the sake of a number redolent of legacy and grandiosity. We should all wear our wrinkles so well.

In what may be a clever play on this sudden disjunction of 467 issues, the story, written by Matt Fraction, divides its plotline between a regular artist Salvador Larroca-penciled present and a glimpse of the future, forty-one years down the line, as depicted by Kano, Nathan Fox, and Carmine Di Giandomenico. Yes, as you might imagine, it’s a Days-Of-Future-Past storyline, wherein the perpetually delayed consequences of today’s actions get played out in oft gleefully fatal ways, either many years down the line or in a parallel reality gone horribly astray. I’ve always wondered – is it a way for creative teams of popular ongoing serials to blow off steam? Let’s watch Wolverine get blasted away by a Sentinel, Buffy get her neck snapped, Batman get the last laugh at Darkseid before bidding adieu – sometimes even the world gets what’s coming to it with an apocalypse as grand as your imagination will allow, only to be reset to the comfortable status quo of the now in the next episode. So take my hand, dear reader, and let’s do the time warp again! We’ll zoom, no doubt, past more than a few cycles of death and resurrection and dips off the wagon (c’mon, you know it’s going to happen) – so tightly bound are such four-color lives to the ever-turning wheel of melodrama.

But that’s my own little reverie – genre concerns have little play here: Tony Stark’s plans have been stolen! For like the zillionth time!

lt’s another iteration of one of the key Iron Man stories (two, actually, this scenario playing out both now and later), perhaps the Iron Man story: those of ill will have a Stark-engineered weapon of awesome power within their grasp and intend to do bad things with it. And thus Tony Stark, being the hands-on capitalist that he is (hell, you gotta earn that mustache), is compelled to right what is wrong and see to it that private property remains private property. Not just for his own exploitation, but (and this is the key to his altruism) for TOMORROW! The classic tropes just don’t stop, but this one’s more specific to character, not genre.

All things said, it’s a decent issue, fairly self-contained, with elements hinted at in the Stark Disassembled arc and seeds planted for future storylines. The present half is a team-up between Iron Man and Spider-Man (Fraction writes a swell Spidey, I’ll say) as they take down the initial thieves, a militia of overambitious trust-funders with a mission statement of wiping out all superpowered folk. Larroca (who I like to imagine pencils his images with the pre-programmed back-and-forth grace of a dot matrix printer) does his very clean photo-referenced thing and basically gets the job done, as is his primary talent.

Appropriately, the future it alternates with is rendered as a messy dystopia, as far from Larocca’s art style as possible, with mechanical sturm und drang being the primary key played out as classic Iron Man villain the Mandarin closes in on humanity’s complete submission (courtesy of that aforementioned piece of  Stark tech, a hulking weapon called the Titanomech, seen here in full world-wrecking mode) but for the efforts of a small band of rebels led by Ginny Stark, Tony’s granddaughter. It’s neatly choreographed between the three art teams, each of whom prove adept at energetic clutter: Kano taking on Ginny Stark, Nathan Fox – aka “Paul Pope, but with a blindspot for faces” – doing the duties on the battle-centric Howard Stark (Tony’s son) scenes, and Carmine Di Giandomenico, resuming duties from the recent Mandarin-centric annual, on the villain sequences; the Mandarin here is very much in line with Fraction’s earlier portrayal of him – a straight-up bully and thief with delusions of redeeming qualities, destroying the Earth out of spite for rejecting him and using 76-year old Tony as his trophy lap dog.

And, plot-wise, the present manages to connect to the future quite cleverly. The story resolves, but that harsh realm of tomorrow is still down the road, a distinct possiblity not yet forestalled – presumably that burden will be left to coming storylines. The past goes unmentioned but you can see it just beneath the surface, all the familiar motifs, just as within the new armor, impressive and modified as it may be, you can see, quite clearly, the play on the old design.